A guest books with a mistyped email address, or an old one they no longer use. Every campaign sent to it hard-bounces, and a list full of addresses like that drags down delivery for every other guest too. Bookboost now handles this automatically: once an address has permanently failed delivery twice, it is marked unreachable and left out of future email sends, without you having to find and remove it yourself.
What it does
Two hard bounces, then excluded. A hard bounce is a permanent delivery failure, for example an address that no longer exists. One hard bounce does not exclude an address; once the same address has hard-bounced twice, Bookboost marks it unreachable.
Unreachable addresses are skipped at send time. Before sending a campaign, Bookboost checks whether the guest's primary email is reachable. If it is not, the email channel is treated as unavailable for that guest and the send is skipped for them, whether or not your audience uses a reachability filter.
The Reachable audience filter picks it up automatically. Audiences built with the Reachable filter now exclude hard-bounced addresses as part of that check, alongside what it already covered. See Understanding Reachability Filters in Bookboost Audiences for the full list of reachability filters.
Nothing was excluded retroactively. When this rolled out, every email address already on file was set to reachable, so no existing guest dropped out of your sends on day one. Only hard bounces recorded from the rollout date onwards count towards the two-strike total.
Correcting an address gives it a fresh start. If a guest's email address is changed, for example to fix a typo, the reachable flag resets and the new address is eligible for sending again.
Do you need to set anything up?
No. This applies automatically to every account and needs no configuration. The only place you interact with it directly is the Reachable filter when building an audience.
What this does not do
Only checks the primary email address. Reachability gating looks at a guest's primary email. It does not extend to any secondary email address on the profile.
Takes two hard bounces, not one. A single permanent failure does not exclude an address.
Resets on any edit, not just a fix. Changing a guest's email address resets the reachable flag even if the new address is the same kind of address as before, so it always gets a fresh start rather than staying flagged.
No flag on the guest profile yet. There is currently no badge or reason shown on the guest or email record explaining why an address was excluded. The Reachable audience filter is the only place to see this today.
Common questions
Will this remove guests I already had in my database?
No. Every address on file when this launched was set to reachable, so nothing was excluded retroactively. Only new hard bounces count from the rollout date onwards.
How do I see which guests are affected?
Build an audience with the Reachable filter set to Include; guests whose primary email has hard-bounced twice will not appear in it. There is not yet a way to see this on an individual guest's profile.
What counts as a hard bounce, versus a soft bounce?
A hard bounce is a permanent failure, for example an address that no longer exists. A soft bounce is temporary, such as a full inbox or a brief server issue, and does not count towards exclusion. See Understanding Email Marketing Metrics in Bookboost for how both are reported.
Getting help
Open Talk to Us in the left menu, or email support@bookboost.io.
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